Astronomers have revealed a remarkable new picture of the deep
universe. The image, shown in full at the end of this post,
contains perhaps 265,000 visible
galaxies crammed into a region smaller than the
moon's apparent size in the sky.

The picture, published May 2, is actually made of 7,500 photos
taken over 16 years by the Hubble Space Telescope, which is
operated by NASA and the European Space Agency. If Hubble had
taken the images in one back-to-back observation, it would have
lasted 250 days.

"No image will surpass this one until future space telescopes
like James Webb are launched," Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University
of California at Santa Cruz, said in a press release.

The new picture is part of an ongoing project known as the
Hubble Legacy Field. The idea
is to focus Hubble's limited time yet incredible resolving power
on a small area of the night sky, year after year, and build the
deepest and most complete image of space. That small survey will
then be applied to the larger universe to improve astronomers'
understanding of it across both space and time.

The project got its start in 1995 when the telescope snapped its
first and famous Hubble Deep Field image. For that
photo, Hubble targeted one of the darkest patches of the night
sky and observed it over 10 days, taking more than 340 photos of
the spot. Scientists
combined the images into a picture that revealed the glow of
several hundred never-before-seen galaxies, stretching our
understanding of the universe's scale and history.

The colors in the photo span from just beyond the edges of human
vision - from ultraviolet to near-infrared light - and contain
galaxies 10 billion times
fainter than our naked eyes can detect.

This effectively offers a deeper view into the past than ever
before: a look at galaxies as they existed 13.3 billion years
ago. That's how long it has taken their light to reach Hubble's
sensors and shows a time about 500 million years after the birth
of the universe.

Before Hubble, the best telescopes could see light from objects
only about 7 billion light-years away.

Zoom in on more than 200,000 galaxies seen by Hubble

Drag on the picture to pan around, and enlarge any part by using
the +/- buttons, pinching on a phone, or using a scroll feature
on a computer.

"Hubble has spent more time on this small area than on any other
region of the sky," the press release said.

Researchers will continue adding to and improving the picture
with new Hubble observations as long as the telescope is
operational. (When Hubble shuts down, NASA may try to plunge it
into a "spacecraft
graveyard" in the Pacific Ocean.)